Founded in 1935, AAP is a national Australian news agency. It is considered the backbone of the national news cycle, providing independent and reliable news and media services to media outlets across print, digital, broadcast. Publishers such as News Corp, Nine, the ABC, SBS are among its key clients who receive its famous ‘newswire’ serving up breaking news in the form of text, image and video around the clock.

AAP

News, Media

Branding

Charles Elena was asked to create an identity that reflected AAP’s core purpose of ‘Connecting Media’ and would also unify the master brand, sub-brands and design collateral.

The key objective of the AAP re-brand was to significantly unite the AAP Group of businesses (which at the time comprised six subsidiaries) and increase revenue bases through cross-selling and streamlined communication and marketing opportunities.

AAP also needed a new website that would position the AAP as the leader in Australian news, information and corporate services.

AAP was seeking to better unite its various commercial businesses to increase revenue through cross selling, streamlined communications and marketing opportunities. The lack of a unified brand strategy with a clear brand family look and feel was holding back the commercial arm’s ability to significantly grow revenue among existing customers through cross- sell and up-sell opportunities as well as attracting new customers.

This misalignment between AAP’s strategic direction and its brand portfolio created the following issues: The Commercial arm’s portfolio of branded services had become fragmented over time which was creating sales hurdles and customer confusion. Many customers viewed AAP as an editorial house rather than an innovative and dynamic provider of media analysis & business intelligence services using new web-based technologies. Planned growth in AAP’s commercial arm needed to be managed in a more structured way.

Charles Elena was asked to create a refreshed brand identity that reflected AAP’s core purpose of ‘Connecting Media’ thereby unifying the master brand, sub-brands and marketing collateral.

Before the re-brand AAP started with more than 20 brands and sub-brands and so we needed to define a new brand architecture that would consolidate and simplify a confusing mix of business and product entities.

Developing AAP’s identity also involved strengthening its perception as a trusted source for accurate, impartial and reliable media information and services. Our mission in developing the brand personality was to portray AAP as a client-centric, dynamic and credible business and the idea of ‘Connecting Media’ and in the digital age.

Charles Elena preserved AAP’s circle device but utilised overlapping gradients to represent connection and unity and give the masterbrand logo a more professional and contemporary look and feel.

To further communicate and enhance this idea of unity, we unified the look and feel of each of the AAP Group’s six brands with a mark that shows each is part of the AAP family. We introduced a collection of sub-brands, each clearly distinguished with a different colour. Each sub-brand logo contained the tagline ‘An AAP Business’ underneath the identity to reinforce that those businesses are part of AAP.